I can't ssh to my Amazon AWS Ubuntu instance using a newly created user and a key pair?

Question

I created a user called 'grader' to my instance and gave it sudo permission, also I switched the password in /etc/ssh/sshd_config to be off.

I generated a key pair in my local machine and added the public key to the instance. when i try to access the instance using the DEFAULT user provided by Amazon AWS and my generated keys it works

ssh -i "udacityLinux" ubuntu@ec2-18-218-9-117.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com

but when i try the same using the 'grader' user

ssh -i "udacityLinux" grader@ec2-18-218-9-117.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com

i get

grader@ec2-18-218-9-117.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com: Permission denied (publickey).

how can i fix this to be able to login using my grader user?

Answer 1

You seem to have a misunderstanding about the public key you upload to the server.

This key must be stored in the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys for every user that should be identified by this key.

So for now you could copy the key file with

sudo cp ~ubuntu/.ssh/authoriyed_keys ~grader/.ssh

then give the file the correct owner and permissions

sudo chown grader:grader ~grader/.ssh/authorized_keys
sudo chmod 0600 ~grader/.ssh/authorized_keys

Keep in mind that now you accept all keys that you might have enabled for the user ubuntu before.